Sergei Yesenin: The Last Poet of Wooden Russia
On 26 December 1925, in a room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad, a thirty-year-old poet opened his left wrist and used the blood to write eight lines of farewell verse. Within a day or two he was hanging from the ceiling pipe; he was found dead on 28 December. He had already been published in seventeen languages across 132 separate editions while still alive, had married Isadora Duncan, and had been hauled in for interrogation by the secret police six times in a single eighteen-month stretch. He called himself the last poet of wooden Russia, and he was not being modest — he was being accurate.
The Grandmother's Chastushkas
He was born on 3 October 1895 in Konstantinovo, a village in Ryazan Governorate, to Alexander Nikitich Yesenin and Tatyana Fyodorovna, who spent most of their time chasing work in Moscow and Ryazan respectively. From the age of two he was handed to his maternal grandparents, the Titovs, in nearby Matovo. That accident of family economics turned out to be the making of him. His grandmother, deeply religious, fed him chastushkas — the terse, sly, four-line folk rhymes of the Russian countryside — along with the saints' legends and village folklore that would supply his imagery for the rest of his life. He was not a scholar of peasant tradition; he had simply lived inside it since childhood, and the difference is audible in every line.
He attended the Konstantinovo zemstvo school from 1904 to 1909 and graduated with honours, then went on to a parish school at Spas-Klepiki. He was writing systematically by 1910. In 1912 he moved to Moscow and took work as a proofreader's assistant, enrolled at Shanyavsky University in 1913, and dropped out within a year because he could not afford it. His first published poem, "The Birch Tree," appeared in January 1914 in a children's magazine called *Mirok*. By that December he had decided that poetry was the whole job.
Petrograd Adopts a Peasant
He arrived in Petrograd in March 1915 and the literary capital fell on him like a discovery. Alexander Blok, then the reigning lyric poet of the Silver Age, pronounced him "a gem of a peasant poet." He fell in with Nikolai Klyuev and Sergey Gorodetsky and co-founded the Krasa group; Klyuev in particular taught him lyric control, and Yesenin promptly outgrew him. His debut collection, *Radunitsa* (1916), glorified the tranquil beauty of the natural world through half-religious imagery, and the city could not get enough of the golden-haired boy from Ryazan.
The war interrupted. Drafted on 25 March 1916, he was assigned to a medical train at Tsarskoye Selo, and at a concert that July the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna herself heard him read "Rus" and "In Scarlet Fireglow." That imperial audience did not make him a monarchist. In October 1916 he spent twenty days under arrest for refusing to produce verses in praise of the throne.
The Revolution That Was Supposed to Be His
He welcomed the February Revolution without reservation, saying later that without it he "might have withered away on useless religious symbolism." He took the October Revolution too, but strictly, as he put it, from a peasant's standpoint — as the promise of a spiritual rebirth for village Russia. The disillusion came fast and it came hard. In "The Stern October Has Deceived Me" and elsewhere he wrote that human individuality was being destroyed. *Kobyli Korabli* ("Mare's Ships," 1919) is an impressionistic indictment of revolutionary suffering. He had backed the upheaval expecting it to save the countryside; it arrived to industrialise it out of existence, and he spent the rest of his short life writing the elegy.
Imaginism and the Hooligan
In September 1918 he befriended Anatoly Marienhof and the two of them founded Imaginism, a movement that put the raw image above meaning, message and metre. He signed the Imaginists' Manifesto in January 1919 and helped set up their publishing house the following month. It was a scandalous, café-and-tavern affair — "prostitutes and bandits are our fans," Yesenin observed with some satisfaction — and it produced *Confession of a Hooligan* (1921) and the dramatic poem *Pugachov* (1921). The hooligan was partly a costume. Britannica describes the double persona precisely: the devout and simple peasant singer on one side, the rowdy and blasphemous exhibitionist on the other, both of them genuine.
Four Wives and a Wandering Decade
The private life was a demolition derby. Anna Izryadnova, a co-worker at the publishing house, bore his son Yuri. Zinaida Raikh, whom he married in August 1917 and left by 1921, gave him a daughter and a son and became a major actress. On 2 May 1922 he married the American dancer Isadora Duncan, eighteen years his senior, and toured Europe and America with her for a year of well-photographed chaos. In early 1925 he married Sophia Tolstaya, granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. Alongside all this ran his affair with the poet Nadezhda Volpina, whose son Alexander became one of the founding figures of the Soviet dissident movement, and his long dependence on Galina Benislavskaya, his secretary from November 1920. He travelled hard between marriages — Rostov-on-Don to Tiflis in 1920, Tashkent and Samarkand in 1921, Azerbaijan in 1924 and 1925, where he wrote and published at Mardakan.
He also drank ruinously, and the drinking produced public scenes. He was arrested and interrogated twice by the OGPU in October 1923, four more times between January and April 1924, and admitted to the Sheremetev hospital that February before transferring to a Kremlin clinic. His last major poem, *Anna Snegina*, was finished in May 1925.
Why Sergei Is Called a Genius
The specific gift was not intellectual range — Yesenin was not a thinker, and he never pretended to be one. It was an ear. He could hear the chastushka's rhythm and the church chant's rhythm at once, and fuse them into a lyric line of such transparent simplicity that Russians memorise it without trying. Blok, who had no reason to flatter a nineteen-year-old peasant, called him a gem on first meeting. In his last phase he took Pushkin as his model and pared his verse down to something lucid, simple and enormously hard to do. The reference literature calls him the most widely read Russian poet of the twentieth century, at home and abroad — a claim you can argue with, but not laugh at.
The counter-case is real. His range is narrow: birch trees, horses, dogs, mothers, taverns, regret. The Imaginist period is loose and self-indulgent, and a good deal of the hooligan verse is pose. Mayakovsky, writing "To Sergei Yesenin" in answer to that blood-written suicide note, made the durable objection — that "to mold life is more difficult" than to sing your own dissolution, and that Yesenin chose the easier grief. Soviet critics, Nikolai Bukharin foremost, dismissed him as a kulak poet. Britannica's verdict is fairer than either camp: what he embodied was a tragic maladjustment to a changing world. That is not the same thing as intellectual greatness, and it does not need to be.
Legacy
Some of his work was suppressed under Stalin and Khrushchev, and most of it was not republished until 1966. It made no difference. Russians went on copying his poems by hand and setting them to music, and today they are standard in the school curriculum. He was buried on 31 December 1925 at Vagankovskoye Cemetery under white marble; Galina Benislavskaya shot herself at the graveside a year later, one of a wave of copycat suicides. A persistent counter-theory holds that the OGPU killed him and staged the hanging, citing missing manuscripts, bruises and thin paperwork; the evidence is suggestive and unproven. Ryazan State University carries his name. So, effectively, does the whole idea of the vanished Russian village.
Achievements
- Genres: lyric poetry and narrative poetry
